Tuesday, 28 October 2014

Over the last few months I was experimenting with setting up my ham-radio station for completely remote operation, so once the rare DX comes on air I can work it regardless of where I am at the time.

The idea seems simple but this means that for a start I need to be able to remotely turn on and off all of the devices. Leaving the design itself for another post, the core element of my remote control concept is rather old ThinkPad x60s laptop. This one comes with Intel PRO/1000 Ethernet NIC and I want to use WoL to boot it up remotely.

What is WoL?
It's a simple way to turn on a machine connected to the network by sending it a single ethernet packet. Very useful if you want to boot up a machine for out-of-hours maintenance run or something similar - like in my case.

Problem
WoL works great but only once, so after you shut down the OS there's no way to do remote start again. This is something that many have encountered judging by the amount of forum posts and questions asked about the same issue.

Once I wasted more time than I should on trying to figure out what's going on, the fix turned out to be "trivial". Lesson learned for sure.